NUKE MAINTENANCE PLANS A MESS

9 May 2003

The National Nuclear Security Administration may be "unable to ensure the vitality and readiness of the nuclear weapons complex," according to a new Energy Department report.The NNSA says it needs $1.5 billion over the next five years for maintaining the nuclear storage facilities at places like Los Alamos National Laboratory. In order to properly dole out this money, each of the nuclear sites is supposed to put together a plan to ascertain what needs fixing and what doesn't. But, the report says, most of these plans were wildly off-target.At Los Alamos, only about 15 of the 1,500 assessments were correct. That's pretty bad. But not as lame as Sandia National Laboratories, which "did not have any accurateassessments," according to the Energy Department.Without these evaluations, it's difficult to keep the country's nuclear weapons stockpile stable, the report concludes. How can you do maintenance, if you don't know what to fix?